The extent of this infinitesimal flora throughout regions where no other forms of vegetation are known, is strikingly demonstrated by the observations of the eminent botanist and traveller. Dr. Hooker, in his account of the Antarctic regions. "Everywhere," he states, "the waters and the ice alike abound in these microscopic vegetables. Though too small to be visible to the unassisted eye, their aggregated masses stained the iceberg and pack-ice wherever they were washed by the sea, and imparted a pale ochreous colour to the ice. From the south of the belt of ice which encircles the globe, to the highest latitudes reached by man, this vegetation is everywhere conspicuous, from the contrast between its colour and that of the white snow and ice in which it is imbedded. In the eightieth degree of south latitude all the surface ice carried along by currents, and the sides of every berg, and the base of the great Victoria barrier itself--a perpendicular wall of ice, from one to two hundred feet above the sea-level--were tinged brown from this cause, as if the waters were charged with oxide of iron. The majority of these plants consist of simple vegetable cells, enclosed in indestructible silex (as other _Algæ_ are in carbonate of lime); and it is obvious that the death of such multitudes must form sedimentary deposits of immense extent. "The universal existence of such an invisible vegetation as that of the Antarctic ocean, is u truly wonderful fact, and the more so, from its being unaccompanied by plants of a high order. This ocean swarms with mollusca, and entomostracous crustaceans, small whales, and porpoises; and the sea with penguins and seals, and the air with birds: the animal kingdom is everywhere present, the larger creatures preying on the smaller, and these again on those more minute; all living nature seems to be carnivorous. This microscopic vegetation is the sole nutrition of the herbivorous animals; and it may likewise serve to purify the atmosphere, and thus execute in the antarctic latitudes the office of the trees and grasses of the temperate regions, and the broad foliage of the palms of the tropics."[127] [Footnote 127: From Dr. Hooker's account of the botany of the South Polar regions in Sir J. Ross's Voyages of Discovery.]